Opinionator: Tonight, Tonight, Its World Is Full of Blight

Dick Cavett on his career in show business, and more.

Tags:

Colbert, Stephen, Griffin, Merv, Letterman, Dave, National Broadcasting Co, Paar, Jack, Television, The Tonight Show (TV Program)

Once again, "The Tonight Show" rears its hoary head in the headlines. (Unintentional word-play.)

The dear old thing, the brainchild of the great Pat Weaver (Sigourney's pop), has endured as if it were a World War II veteran surviving health crisis after health crisis over the years, defying demise.

For me, addicted watching began with Jack Paar. When Jack departed the show for good in 1962 — having left it temporarily once already — it was predicted that "Tonight" would die on the vine. Who could replace that sentimental, explosive, compellingly neurotic master of late-night? And where would you even begin to look for such a one?

The answer came. The boyishly nice-looking guy from Nebraska, collegiate and witty, who killed 'em out of the public eye at Friars' roasts and trade lunches while hosting the ungrammatically named game show "Who Do You Trust?" (TV's earliest dumbing down?)

The powers could breathe easily. The "Tonight" cash cow, without Jack, would not one day be found dead in the pasture.

And now, for a little-remembered fact: It didn't go well for Johnny Carson at first. Hard to believe about his smashing 30-year endurance record at that desk.

Let me take you back. A now-forgotten summer passed between Jack's exit and Johnny's debut. There were contract matters, but Johnny also well knew it would have been unwise, with Jack's departing good-bye wave still fresh in bereft viewers' minds, to pop brightly onto his predecessor's stage as the clean-cut but resented new boy.

And there was another factor. It was called Merv Griffin.

A virtual mob of substitute hosts that summer — and oh, did I write for them — included not only Merv but various comics, movie stars, Groucho Marx, Mort Sahl, Art Linkletter (let's keep moving), Donald O'Connor (!), Jerry Lewis, a Gabor, and on and on, all trying their variously talented hands at what Jack made look easy.

Merv did two weeks sensationally. Johnny spent a goodly amount of awkward, between-jobs time that summer in his high-rise apartment over the East River with his drums, his telescope and his compulsive reading, practicing his card sleights and then having to endure a gradually rising tide of articles and column items about how Merv should have been the one to get "The Tonight Show."

I could never figure out why there seemed to be an almost organized campaign to take the show back from Johnny before he ever got it. Merv, not above, shall we say, dedicated self-interest, was to my mind probably quietly instrumental in much of this. But then who, in our business, never known for being full of selfless sweethearts, would not fight at least tooth, if not nail, for the Big Prize?

If you were around then and aware, I'll bet you've suppressed, repressed or forgotten that Merv, while not getting the show, did get his own duplicate of "Tonight" on NBC daytime. The two shows made their debuts at the same time. Merv got the good reviews.

(Being a brash lad, I summoned the testicularity at the time to ask Johnny his thoughts on Merv as chat-show host. Came the reply, "A case of the bland leading the bland.")

In the words of the TV scribes, Johnny was "stiff," "awkward," "uncomfortable" and even "phony." Merv, on the contrary, was hailed with a list of "up" adjectives: "bright," "clever," "sharp," "sincere" and "a good listener."

I insert a namedrop here: I was startled to hear the astute "Fat Jack" Leonard say, backstage at a benefit, "I'm sorry, but that Carson guy ain't makin' it."

He wasn't all wrong. Johnny took a slow slide into the job before hitting his stride. And, at first, it was painful to watch, and agony for him. Who would believe this now, familiar with only his later years?

Pundits agreed, NBC had made a mistake.

Hard as the fact is to digest in light of Johnny's decades on that throne, insiders assured us it was, as one columnist put it, just a matter of time for Mr. Carson.

And of course, how right that was.

It was a mere three decades.

I've been asked for comments by various columnists and publications these days, what with the T. Show back in the news with the Leno-Fallon-Kimmel eruption. NBC must have a bushel-size bottle of Bayer product in their infirmary labeled "Recurrent 'Tonight Show' Headaches." There's probably enough material for a series in the various "Tonight" traumas over the years, with episodes titled, "Jack Walks"; "Jack Returns"; "Johnny Arrives"; "Johnny Struggles, Then Triumphs"; "Jay Soars"; "Jay Demoted"; "Conan at Bat"; "Bye-Bye, Conan"; "Jay Redux"; "Kimmel Threatens"; "Fallon on the Rise"; "Jay Re-Threatened" and so on, into the late night.

Ironically, all this takes place at a time when there are articles, including one in 2010 in The New Yorker, about how late-night talk is doomed to be a fading commodity.

I've been widely asked about the reported building of a new set for our East Coast Jimmy — whether I'm among those who think "Tonight" belongs in Manhattan. Yes. And it always did.

James Barron quoted me last week in this paper as saying that for me the show was always "a lifeline to New York." When home in Nebraska on visits during college, it was my fix.

(I, too, shared the lifeline honor. More than once I'd hear from an actor tired of the exhausting town-to-town trouping: After our show, on the road, we'd go back to the hotel room in Detroit or Omaha or Klamath Falls, pour a drink and say, "Switch on Cavett, quick, for some New York oxygen.")

Jack started it and all of us took our shows to L.A. from time to time for a fortnight. I can't say why, exactly, but "Tonight" just means Gotham, in the same way that Grand Central would just look wrong somehow in Burbank.

Bit of a scoop? Once when I was on with Johnny out there after his coast move, in a moment of confidential frankness during a commercial, he whispered, "Richard, I'm not convinced yet that this was one of my genius ideas."

Another time, when I was a guest with Johnny not long after he'd started his cut-down-to-an-hour shows, he told me backstage that he'd convinced himself that the cutting back would seem easier and shorter. And that, to his surprise, it didn't.

When growing up out there in the West, both Johnny and I (at separate times) dreamed the traditional dream of the bright lights of Broadway and the glamour of Manhattan. New York, New York was our craved Shangri-La. Not the La Brea Tar Pits.

If my friend Dave Letterman should decide next contract time that he's sat through one too many starlet guests who come on to plug their movies, exhibit seemingly a yard of bare gam, pepper their speech with "likes" and "I'm like" and "awesome" and "oh, wow" and "amazing," and list at least seven things they are "excited" about despite the evidence, from who knows what cause, of their half-mast eyelids, I'll regret his going.

And speaking of Dave's presumably stepping aside some sad day, if CBS is smart, there is in full view a self-evident successor to The Big L. of Indiana.

The man I'm thinking of has pulled off a miraculous, sustained feat, against all predictions — descendants of those same wise heads who foresaw a truncated run for the Carson boy — of making a smashing success while conducting his show for years with a dual personality. And I don't mean Rush Limbaugh (success without personality).

I can testify, as can anyone who's met him and seen him as himself, how much more there is to Stephen Colbert than the genius job he does in his "role" on "The Colbert Report." Everything about him — as himself — qualifies him for that chair at the Ed Sullivan Theater that Letterman has so deftly and expertly warmed for so long. Colbert is, among other virtues, endowed with a first-rate mind, a great ad-lib wit, skilled comic movement and gesture, fine education, seemingly unlimited knowledge of affairs and events and, from delightful occasional evidence, those things called The Liberal Arts — I'll bet you he could name the author of "Peregrine Pickle." And on top of that largess of qualities (and I hope he won't take me the wrong way here), good looks.

Should such a day come, don't blow it, CBS.

Mercy. I just checked my word count. It seems I'm getting a dose of memory-triggering about working for Carson, Jack and Merv. But right now we both need a rest. I'll save, until you have me back, how my big mouth nearly blew me out of my cherished job with Jack.

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